A Guide to Forming GSAsCalifornia Water Foundation Report, September 2015

November 4, 2015

The California Water Foundation has released a report – Know
Your Options: A Guide to Forming Groundwater Sustainability
Agencies” which is authored by Valerie Kincaid and Ryan
Stager of O’Laughlin and Paris LLP.

“Know Your Options” is meant to provide local agencies and
interested stakeholders with a resource for groundwater
sustainability agency (GSA) formation and coordination under
SGMA. It focuses on memorandums of agreement (MOAs) and
joint powers agreements (JPAs), two legal arrangements mentioned
in SGMA that can be used by local agencies for GSA formation and
groundwater sustainability plan (GSP) development and
implementation. To provide examples, the Guide examines relevant
case studies of actual MOAs and JPAs to highlight how past
agreements have navigated the discussed topics. Finally, the
Guide provides templates for both an MOA for GSAs coordinating
their respective GSPs, and a JPA for local agencies to use for
creating a JPA to serve as a GSA. These template agreements may
help agencies organizing management structures to better identify
the challenges of governance and structure coordination to meet
these challenges.